Thursday, July 17, 2014

THE MULEGE AMOEBA DREAMThe “simplest” of dreams & comment on what I think it tells us about what we can say about the many matters that are the case.The dream, the Amoeba Dream – an entirely narcissistic dream since it involved an injury to a hyper-cathected part the body ego - was dreamt in January of 1992, in the small town of Mulege, in Baja California Sur, Mexico; and its singing woke me rather earlier and less pleasantly than the towns many roosters, braying burros, dogs and birds usually did. Visually, the dream was represented in the form of “A profusion of Chinamen - singing in unison, and dressed in yellow, delta-shaped hats - cutting into the walls of a convoluted mine shaft.” Transcribed into words, the dream said: “Some Chinks are working overtime in the mine shafts.” [Chink/sing] – I awoke knowing, without needing to reflect on or analyze the dream, that I was suffering from a severe case of intestinal amoebas; the toilet was nearby, as was my collection of native herbal cures that the prescient traveler had acquired from the big glass jars stacked to the ceiling at that badly lighted ancient, mysterious and beautiful shop, the Central Botanica in Ensenada. The question is: What does it take for this dream to be dreamt, acted upon, comprehended, communicated, and remembered, etc. 1] Evidently a goodly number of amoebas, which I knew to be lethal if they accumulate in your liver or course in your blood stream into your brain. 2] Someone who informs himself as to the danger of intestinal amoebas, and who is therefore on the alert; the quality of mental alertness. 3] Someone who, nonetheless, becomes careless as to what he eats, or unlucky with the dishes he eats from. 4] Someone with an ear to listen to what sings in his dreams. 5] On a more serious note: a] Intestines with nerves. b] Nerves that are in communication, in the way that nerves communicate, with the brain, its vestiges in the stomach & at the top end of the digestive worm. Brain cells, synapses, brain chemistry and circuitry, electricity. c] A perceptual system that registers amoebas cutting into intestines as pain; the knowledge of what pain is; the ability to respond to pain. d] A perceptual system that translates the sensations into visual representation; the system evidently must have access to a variety of sources to reach its conclusion; what nexus is it where the information, coming from the various sources, is combined? And whence the information can be unraveled, to an extant to what we call associating involuntarily. e] A narrative function that represents what is occurring in story form; the narrative function itself is dependent on the mental state that we call curiosity; brief, nearly as a telegram as this communication to my self was. f] An inner eye that perceives what is being presented to it; g] An inner ear that hearkens; h] A recognition of danger, to which one can react with fright; i] A communicative system, in the brain, that translates these matters into what we call consciousness [or a consciousness that always is so, be it in a sleeping or waking state], evidently related, in this instance, to an ability to “hear” and “see”, apparently an internalized eye and ear looking and listening inwardly. - How would this dream be dreamt by someone who is congenitally blind? How do you store the idea of amoebas if you are blind: as woodpeckers, as tiny dogs or rats that may have bitten you? At any event: by analogy. Yet what if you are both blind and deaf but can read Braille: tactilely then? As taste? j] The ability to waken from sleeping into a state that we call awake, simultaneously conscious in this instance of waking and of having been seized by the dream - that is, both of what is inside and what is outside and of the distinction between the two, which were not reflective of each other and stood in no relationship to each other; one part of me, still seized by the inner experience, is taking in a much less charged outside.k] The ability, first, to translate the information into visual imagery and then into words, although the original translation may have been from verbal form into imagery; possibly the translation of what was occurring physically was translated simultaneously into visual as well as verbal terms; yet a variety of memories were evidently accessed for the formulation; grammar; a notion of “sense.” All of those areas were accessed. The dream was dreamt in English; it might also have been dreamt in German; by the fourth incident of amoebic dysentery it could also have been dreamt in Mexican. Intestinales!m] A brain, some of whose various functions, had it been observed by magnetic resonance imaging, would have appeared to be especially active; that is, an economic factor would have been discernible in the images taken. Intensity. An anxious brain, since it knew it could be invaded by amoebas!n] Someone still strong enough to rush to the toilet and proceed on his cure, including a ten day course of Flagyl, which contains minute amounts of arsenic and is therefore even tougher on your stomach than natural herbal concoctions;o] A computer dream screen on which to reverie this communication into one piece! Simple as the dream seems to be as a communication of danger, of an internal one in this instance, it contains one oddity that may even be apparent to someone who does not know the penumbra of my associations: why did the “chinks” that the amoebas cut into intestinal walls, so as to access the bloodstream and proliferate there, need to be represented by “Chinamen” in delta-shaped yellow hats. The “yellow” is easy enough and is realistic in the sense of “yellow plague”: after all, I was being plagued by a “yellow peril” of sorts; I didn‘t like those “chinks” that they were producing, not one bit; moreover, “yellow” is a frequent byproduct of infections, which however I cannot be said to have had: the color yellow is also a by product of liver disease; I can be said to have been scared first yellow and then shitless by the dream; however, my temperature felt quite normal, anxiety of a possibly impending infection then. There is the matter of the “delta” or triangle-shaped hats [seen from a certain angle, as that in the dream, such hats can look triangular and have a dimension, so there is a representational distortion going on in this efficient condensation: however, the notion of “delta-shaped” probably derived from my knowledge of one of the oldest unchanging creatures in our world, the shape of the excrescences of the three million year old jelly-fish, which leave such an unpleasant sting, and a sufficiency of whose defensive emissions can kill you. Yet why the inefficiency of going to the trouble of turning this profusion of dream-mine-mind-magnified “delta-shaped” chink-producing amoebas into “men.” The dream had one other message, and that message was: “You are screwed!” And, literally, only men can screw men: aside the metaphoric truth of that communication of my possible death, the dream thoughts touched on more ancient anxieties. Also: the sheer profusion of these “little men” reminded me of what Lilliputians can do to one’s sense of grandiosity, which had become quite inflated during those first three months in the Baja - what we call the “super-ego” was glad to be out of Bush the First’s Los Estados Unidos Norte and its host of investigations; thusly decompressed, it was quite unrestrained, a bit high, before I was brought low; and dreams being brought low, too, had an ancient history. CommentaryA] Regarding the dream within the history of dream interpretation, I think it would be safe to conclude that what is called “primary process” and “secondary process” mentation occurred simultaneously. How long had the dream been “brewing”? Although amoebas propagate exponentially, it had to have been brewing for some time, but these “chinks” singing was the first I heard of it, the first evidence I had seen of them and the blood they drew. A critical mass had been reached which exceeded whatever disavowal, whatever defenses, if that is the word here, I had put up against wanting to realize what was transpiring inside me. After all, my stool told me that this biting had been going on longer since the minutes that I had dreamt the dream. I had had a delicious very lean Mexican steak at a restaurant called Los Equipales, which is still owned by one Francisco [Pancho] Marron, an interesting last name indeed, though its bearer was quite unaware of its significance. Perhaps the amoebas had feasted on the steak before again turning to me. B] As to wishes being fulfilled: this would seem to be a pretty straightforward anxiety dream, and the only wish that might be latent is the wish to get well. The dream, as pure communication, may possibly be overdetermined in that it also manifests elements of hysteria; and so the notion that the shape of the amoebas was triangular may be overdetermined, too. The “hats” may be the only source of humor, since the sensation of pain mingled with intestinal tickling, the singing sounded also like giggling. However, the amoebas were also on their way to knocking my head/hat off. An overall - nearly petroglyphic - efficiency is to be noted in the construction of the dream for the purpose of being communicative. As to what is called displacement and condensation: the displacement is fairly minor in this instance if for the simple reason that there was a wanting to know directly; condensation is essential if only for the sake of nerve transmission and brain processing. C] As to compromises: the communication strikes me as about as direct as possible. There was no pleasure, only pain and greater pain on the horizon. This was a one-act dream, from which I awoke upon a realization of its significance. The matter of the dream drawing on a variety of mental capacities – does that make it automatically a compromise? Or ought the term compromise be reserved for the transformation of conflicting elements that turn into a third element that can be broken down into its components? Though the associations to the various elements of the dream then become fairly numerous, the message being sung is pretty unequivocal, univocal. D] This is a self-state dream in the sense that it injured my sense of grandiosity; in that respect it is a dream that communicates an injury to the body ego. E] I noted the dream down that morning, made it part of a memoir of my three years in Baja California Sur, and recounted it a few times to people unfamiliar with the esoteric pseudo-science as being illustrative of the pragmatic use of hearkening to your dreams, in the faint hope that they might also pay attention to other matters that dreams can tell them about themselves. I have had similarly efficient dreams about tooth infections, impending colds. F] There is no other person in the dream but my body, except for that profusions of “Chinamen” [with whose few shopkeeper descendents in Mulege, inasmuch as I had become aware of their existence, I was on the best of terms,] and that body is that of a Gulliver who may have been gullible to assume a false sense of security in thinking that he was too big to eat while the Lilliputians were carving gullies into him. G] It is possible to conclude from this dream that the mind/brain - in analogy to my beloved term “super-ego” - has a nexus one might term “super coordinator” or “supra-processor,” the main terminal where all these matters come together, and did sufficiently forcefully so to overcome the wish to go on sleeping. H] As a matter of fact - excepting my ability to translate the dream into verbal language - we can imagine it being dreamt by just about any mammal in a similar state of distress. I am fairly certain that when my dog wakens from his yapping excited REM dreams and I wave either a rabbit’s foot or a deer’s hoof before his nose and he avidly nods in assent, that the chase he has been engaged is for the eternal rabbit or Bambi. I] In the fewest possible words: from the nexus to the parts, or via the part to the nexus. Despite taking even greater care with the food I consumed I managed to contract three further cases of amoebic dysentery in Mexico and one here in Seattle; the onset of each of which was communicated by a dream.